Q: Tracey Emin

02/12/20

Published in the winter 2020 issue of Art Quarterly

NA Meets: Øystein Ustvedt, Munch expert

24/09/20

NA Meets: Øystein Ustvedt, Munch expert

There is a small library of books on Edvard Munch, including several already written by the art critic, curator, and expert on the artist, Øystein Ustvedt. But his new publication, Edvard Munch: An Inner Life, is intended to offer a wide-reaching, all-encompassing introduction for the lay reader.

 

Ustvedt couldn’t be better qualified for the task. He is head of the Stenersen Museum, a curator at the National Museum in Oslo and has curated several exhibitions of Munch’s work. Ahead of the book’s publication, Norwegian Arts talked with Ustvedt about what this volume will offer that others do not, his personal views on the artist he has spent so much time researching, and how he would like to expand his horizons in the future.

Read the full interview here

Edvard Munch: The Graphic Works

10/04/19

Edvard Munch: The Graphic Works

Edvard Munch: love and angst

British Museum

11 April – 21 July 

Although best known today for his paintings, it was through his graphic works that Edvard Munch made his international name. This exhibition at the British Museum, London – the largest of his prints in 45 years and compiled in collaboration with Norway’s Munch Museum – brings together some of his most iconic images, and reunites a number of prints with their matrices, elucidating the various processes involved in their making. Norwegian Arts looks at the artist’s experimental use of lithography, etching and woodcut.

Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s inscription at the foot of an 1896 black-and-white lithographic print of his iconic painting The Scream (1893) – ‘I felt the great scream throughout nature’ – is almost as soul-wrenching and shudder-inducing as the world-famous image itself. According to Giulia Bartrum, the curator of the British Museum’s forthcoming exhibition, ‘Edvard Munch: love and angst’ (11 April to 21 July), the wide-mouthed figure shown covering his or her ears, long assumed to be screaming, might, in fact, be hearing the scream rather than uttering it. The full title of the work, The Scream of Nature, similarly supports this standpoint. Either way, the very fact that such discussion is still ongoing, 126 years after the painting of the picture, shows the enduring appeal and intrigue of the Symbolist artist’s work. This lithograph will be one of more than 80 works on display, primarily comprising prints, from the period between 1894, when Munch first began experimenting with graphic media, and the first decade of the 20th century. During this time, Munch travelled a lot between Kristiania (modern-day Oslo), Paris and Berlin. It was in Berlin that he made his first print, aged 30. 

Read the full feature on the Norwegian Arts site

Harald Sohlberg: A National Treasure

08/02/19

Harald Sohlberg: Painting Norway

Dulwich Picture Gallery

13 February - 2 June

An Yves Kleinian blue is pierced by the bright, white light of the Evening Star. Beneath it, a range of white mountains rise and fall, like drapery, almost as if breathing, or foaming like the peaks of waves. In the foreground, eerie, bare and broken trees pierce the silent serenity, forming crosses and grave markers, as if amidst the rubble of a battlefield. A vivid expression of the sublime – although, perhaps equally a precursor of the uncanny shivers of the surreal – Winter Night in the Mountains (1914) is arguably the most ambitious work of Norwegian artist Harald Sohlberg (1869-1935), and is widely considered to be the ‘national painting of Norway’. It remained his obsession for 14 years, and he produced many versions in his attempts to capture exactly what he wanted.

Although less well known outside of his home country than his contemporary Edvard Munch, Sohlberg is nevertheless being described by Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, as ‘one of the greatest masters of landscape painting in the history of Norwegian art’. Denying the influence of other artists on his work, and attributing the origins of his ‘artistic awakening’ to his own psyche, his oeuvre unites elements of Romanticism, Naturalism and Symbolism, always drawing on the Nordic landscape and its vast potential to depict both the earthly and the infinite. As Dario Gamboni describes in his catalogue essay to accompany the gallery’s forthcoming exhibition, ‘Harald Sohlberg: Painting Norway’ (13 February to 2 June), whereas Munch chose to foreground the human figure, treating the landscape as an additional expression of ‘a state of the soul’, Sohlberg focused primarily on the landscape, with the merest hint of human presence. This exhibition, which is travelling from the Nasjonal Museet, Oslo, marks the 150th anniversary of the artist’s birth and will be the first solo exhibition of his work outside of Norway. 

Read the full feature for Norwegian Arts here

Interview: Bjarne Melgaard

10/03/18
Bjarne Melgaard: A Contradiction in Terms

‘I don’t do art to make everybody like me and I don’t have any problems with people not liking my work.’ For an artist who has more often than not courted controversy with his paintings, films and installations, this is doubtless a good thing. A lesser character might have kowtowed to criticism and given up his art-making, but not Bjarne Melgaard. ‘I believe in freedom of speech. I don’t see my work as very mainstream, so when I get reactions saying it is stupid, everyone is entitled to their opinion. But I am also entitled to my opinion. As long as you know yourself what you’re doing, and you’re convinced about it, then you can handle anything.’

Melgaard’s current exhibition, which opened on 23 February at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London, is by no means as controversial as many of his earlier offerings – which have seen him variously accused of racism, paraphilia and paedophilia. Showing alongside an exhibition of works by Sturtevant, Melgaard’s solo show – his first with the gallery in London – sees the 17th-century Ely Room filled with a suite of 14 new paintings, Bodyparty (Substance Paintings), each 180x180cm. Because of the age of the building, the heavy canvases could not be hung on the walls, and so they stand about, propped up on marble blocks. Melgaard, however, likes this ‘improvised’ feel, echoing the ‘casual easiness’ with which the works stand on the floor in his studio, and describes the whole coming together of the exhibition, proposed to him ‘at very short notice’ by Ropac’s new senior global director, and former director of Serpentine Galleries, Julia Peyton-Jones, as ‘very organic and very fast’.

Read the full interview on the Norwegian Arts website here

Review of Munch : Van Gogh at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

04/01/16

Munch : Van Gogh
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam 
25 September 2015 – 17 January 2016
 
“During his short life, Van Gogh did not allow his flame to go out. Fire and embers were his brushes during the few years of his life, whilst he burned out for his art.” – Munch, 1933
 
From 1900 onwards, works by Edvard Munch (1863-1944) and Vincent van Gogh (1853-90) were increasingly shown together. An exhibition in Cologne in 1912 heralded the two artists as the fathers of modern art. Despite being in Paris around the same time and frequenting many of the same places, it is not thought that Munch and Van Gogh ever met. Their lives and works, however, display uncanny parallels, both setting out to be painters in 1880 and both struggling with and injuring themselves during periods of depression and mental ill health. This thorough exhibition put together by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Munch Museum in Oslo is the first to explore these overlapping trajectories in any depth.

The exhibition opens with a self-portrait by each artist. Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait as a Painter (1887-88) is almost pointillist in style, with thick strokes and vivid colour. Munch, on the other hand, in Self-Portrait with Palette (1926), uses much thinner paint and allows patches of canvas to show through. Both artists portray themselves with the tools of their trade and a heavy frown. Throughout the exhibition, the key current is one of emotions and expression, with each artist taking a rollercoaster ride through life, exploring new techniques for sharing these experiences with the world. We see them develop in terms of freedom of style and choice of colours, from their early paintings, such as Van Gogh’s caricature-like The Potato Eaters (1885) and Munch’s impressionist Morning (1884), through depictions of trees, sunsets, starry nights, wheat fields and couples promenading. Intimate renderings of their bedrooms draw the main comparison to a close, before a final “symphony”, intended to create an impression of each artist’s most significant series of works, through short slide shows and reproductions: Van Gogh’s Décoration (August-October 1888) and Munch’s Frieze of Life (1893-1944).

Read the rest of this review here